


And His Innocent Child

by fadeverb



Category: The Tempest - Shakespeare
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-08
Updated: 2015-06-08
Packaged: 2018-04-03 13:14:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4102324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fadeverb/pseuds/fadeverb
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ariel is a spirit, and mortal children are a peculiar thing for him to watch; all the more so to see Caliban and Miranda, growing up into different creatures than before.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And His Innocent Child

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thinlizzy2](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thinlizzy2/gifts).



> Thanks to joyeusenoelle and my other friendly beta readers, who ward me against lack of clarity.

Not in time, not outside of it, but caught by it and never entirely escaping, a swimmer in the rapids who can't fight to shore, Ariel sees Miranda as a double-image: infant and adult, and all the stages of childhood between. Her father is a single fixed point. There is no change to Prospero, whatever he says, that reaches to his core; he is a man of magic and books, even when the books are gone. He is more rigid than the tree that he broke asunder. He is, in a word, boring.

Ariel is easily bored. That's why he loves the children.

Ariel is spun through time, and cuts it across it. That's why he sees the children in tangles of ages, where they see each other only in straight lines of younger to older, side by side.

Miranda is five years old, stalking determinedly along the beach with a stick dragging behind her. She has a goal in mind: Caliban, who is fifteen, crouched on the sand with his hands digging into the wet places where bubbles still rise. (Dinner for mortals, including a mortal man who never foraged for shellfish before he arrived on this island, and has no intention of learning how when Caliban can provide and Ariel can be commanded.) He looks up, an uncertain smile on his face at her approach. The sorcerer calls this boy misshapen. How can the man tell? All humans are made of rigid stuff, masses of meat and muscle glued together with salty blood. It's only the blood that makes them more than the rocks. They have nothing on the sea.

Or maybe Miranda is nine, talking careful steps as her father says she ought, her skirt caught in one hand to keep it from dragging on the ground. Caliban is eight, and already a head taller than her, striding at her side with a forked stick in hand. "At the lowest tide, then you will find the best time for digging," he says, formal as he can make himself, "as so, and minding the return of the waves."

"My father says I ought not dirty my skirts." Miranda huffs a little, trying to keep up with his longer strides. "I shall need a longer stick."

"You tie your skirts up at your side," Caliban says, "and only muddy your hands, which you might wash easily in the surf, see?"

Ariel sees where the children do not. He is caught in a whirlpool of time, never out and never through, between Prospero's arrival and departure. The ship in the distance and the crash of the waves weary him, the chattering new men bore him, and he dares not look into the center of the whirlpool, where the tree awaits. Never back to that dark center. He cuts across time, flitting about on Prospero's errands, and pauses to hover over Miranda's shoulder as she weeps.

"The sea has come to your face," Ariel says, "because you have not bid it a good morning yet today."

"I am dying," Miranda says. "You must weave me a shroud."

Ariel does not recall that Miranda died, not on the island. He searches through time, before and after, plunging his head into the water until he sees through the mass of reality into its hidden places.

"You are only bleeding," he says, "as mortals do."

"I will die of it," Miranda says, scrubbing tears off her cheeks with dirty hands. "I will be buried here, beneath that old tree, and my father will neglect my grave. He will forget me entirely when I am not there for him to see each day."

"You are full up of blood, and more leeches from your bones," Ariel says. He pets her hair, which grows longer and longer, while her father's is trimmed always back to the same length again. If one must be mortal, one ought to be a changeable mortal, Ariel decides, who might keep him amused and not merely order him about. "You will be well, and all will be well."

"Thou art a spirit and a fool," Miranda says. Her voice shakes. And she is four years old, drumming her heels on the stones of the house where Prospero lives, like a hermit crab stealing a shell from the witch who wore the place before him. "I want!" she howls at the room. "I want!"

She hasn't enough knowledge of toys or trinkets or mortal desires to know what she wants, only that she lacks and needs and is at a loss for some undefinable object that ought to be before her.

"Calm the child," Prospero says to Ariel, not lifting his head from the book he pores over. "Have you no charms for such a simple task?"

"A slumber of a hundred years," Ariel says, "would keep her from your hearing."

Oh, the wrath of the old man, at the thought of harm--though it would have been no harm, only a pleasant sleep of pleasant dreams--to the child he has no time for himself. It is very like him to give the basics of life, children and food and clothing, to the work of others, as beneath him and yet valuable in their execution.

Ariel carries the girl away on the wind, and dries her tears with hot sunlight. "I will give you a playmate," he says, "for mortal child ought speak with mortal child, and make a mortal world thereby."

Caliban waits in the shade of the hut, its roof dried leaves and its walls dried sticks, chin on his bony knees. He is dreaming of his mother, though he would not say so to any about him. He startles backward in surprise when the girl is deposited before him; she is too startled to cry any longer.

"Mortal girl for mortal boy," Ariel says, "make yourselves kin, for who else can be kin to your blood?"

"She has a father," Caliban says, "and I have no mother. Would you make us brother and sister?" He is small, and of some age or another, ten or twelve or sixteen, angry at Ariel because he cannot be angry at Prospero in the man's presence. "Or would you make us man and wife?"

Ariel shrugs, and surfaces in time. He only meant to stop her crying.

"O brave new world," Miranda breathes. She is an adult, and she is leaving, and she might never change again. Perhaps that is the fate of all mortals, to shift through a dozen states in their childhood, and then plant roots and grow themselves a rigid trunk that cannot be moved. Only left, or destroyed. Ariel could grieve for the loss, if he knew any human sadness. He has no tears for such creatures. He is a changeable thing, as the wind. That which cannot change cannot hold his interest or his grief.

"This island is mine," Caliban declares, waving his hand wide to indicate everything they can see. The two of them stand with their backs to the ocean; the foam of the incoming tide licks at their bare feet.

"It belongs to my father," Miranda says, six years old and stubborn as the man she names. "He has told me so. My father is no liar, but a wise and learned man."

"And yet my mother lived here before him." Caliban jerks a chin towards the highest point in the island. "You see there, where she once watched the horizon for spirits. She caught spirits and bound them; your father only frees them."

"Where is your mother now?" Miranda asks.

"Where is your mother?" Caliban demands, and she has no answer for him.

Ariel turns away from talk of mortal kin who breed and breathe and die, in one manner or another. He has known one mortal who was a mother and she was no friend. He is caught in the spin of time, and settles himself at Miranda's shoulder. "You are crying again," he says, "and yet you do not bleed. Shall I fly you away to play with Caliban?"

"No, thou foolish spirit," Miranda says. "I would not play with Caliban again. Could a wind take me from this island, to a world of other men? Or are all men such as Caliban, when they are grown?"

"Such as Caliban or such as your father," Ariel says, carelessly, as he does not know and she cannot compel the truth from him. "And all women are such as you or such as Sycorax. Caliban will grow old and become a wizard, you will grow old and become a witch, and I will escape from this island during your rutting. You will bind spirits and he will free them. Is this not the way of the mortal world?"

"Such horrible words," Miranda says, "from such a fair spirit."

"All spirits are fair and free," Ariel says, "except when we are not."

He is not free yet. Deep in the center of the spin of time that has caught him, he can see his own self, trapped by pine that binds him and pierces him as if he were made of flesh himself, being freed. Not freed, though, never free, while Prospero stands before him with book and wand.

And at the sorcerer's side, almost forgotten, a toddling child pulling grass out of the dirt to chew on the stems.

"Is this a child?" Ariel asks. He takes up a blade of grass to hold above its head, and the awkward creature reaches for it with grubby fists. "It looks very little like the other one."

Prospero asks, "What other one?"

Time wishes to draw him in, back, down, to the prison of the tree. To the place where he can see nothing of before or after, only endless pain. Ariel breaks away and out. He pulls himself through the passage of the years, cutting across the spin, seeing Caliban tall and short and tall again, Miranda toddling and running and walking slowly with her skirts held in one hand. The mortal children walked together through time at the same pace, but here Caliban is a man and Miranda is a giggling child clinging to the branches of a tree, here Caliban is nine years old with eyes like the ocean's depths and Miranda is a woman grown.

What of it? Ariel swirls through the air, escaping that when entirely. What of mortals who grow and change, and mortals who do not? Sycorax was always Sycorax, and Prospero was always Prospero, and Miranda has become a woman on a ship growing smaller and smaller on the horizon. Caliban cannot hold him, Prospero has set him free, and Miranda has unchanging men neither father nor brother to her.

Ariel watches the ship, and wonders what she will make of the new world. He is a spirit of air, and changeable, and no longer trapped inside time. He does not wonder for long. He does not watch the ship disappear. He does not remember her any longer.


End file.
